1. Field
The present invention generally relates to portable electronic devices. More specifically, the present invention relates to the design of a dual-purpose hardware aperture on a portable electronic device.
2. Related Art
The capabilities of portable electronic devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable computers, and portable media players, have increased dramatically. These increased capabilities enable modern portable devices to support a wide variety of applications and to store large amounts of documents, media, and/or other files in various formats. For example, a single portable device may function as a mobile phone, a web browser, a portable media player, an email client, a document editor, and a global positioning system (GPS) based navigation system. Similarly, portable computers such as tablet personal computers (PCs) may incorporate the functionalities of full operating systems and application suites in a compact form factor.
The increased capabilities of portable electronic devices are made possible by specific hardware components, such as a high-speed processor, a large memory, a high-resolution display screen, multiple wireless transceivers, multiple input/output (I/O) devices, and/or multiple sensors. To accommodate the various hardware components, the portable device may include multiple physical apertures. For example, the portable device may include apertures for a camera lens, one or more speaker ports, a microphone, a headphone jack, electrical connectors, input devices (e.g., buttons, touchpad, keyboard, pointing stick, trackball, etc.), card slots, and/or electrical ports. However, each of these apertures creates a potential point of failure in the portable device, which lowers the overall reliability of the portable device. Consequently, portable devices may be improved by reducing the number of apertures required to accommodate the various hardware components.